Letters to priest provide rare insight into life of Jackie Kennedy

Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy’s thoughts about her marriage to President John F Kennedy, their life in the White House and her reaction to his assassination are revealed in newly discovered letters she wrote to an Irish priest before and after she became first lady of the United States.

The archive of her 14-year-long correspondence with Fr Joseph Leonard – a Vincentian priest who lived in All Hallows in Drumcondra in Dublin – will be sold at an auction in Ireland next month.

In the previously unpublished letters, Jackie tells Fr Leonard how Kennedy, who was then a rising star in American politics, was consumed by ambition “like Macbeth”....

In a letter written in 1953, when she was still only 23, she confided to Fr Leonard: “Maybe I’m just dazzled and picture myself in a glittering world of crowned heads and Men of Destiny– and not just a sad little housewife . . . That world can be very glamorous from the outside – but if you’re in it – and you’re lonely – it could be a Hell.”